Re: MacShrinkit

[wbdesnoy@acs5.acs.ucalgary.ca (Byron Desnoyers Winmill)]

I would choose the combination of tar and gzip, using some form of encoding
(MacBinary II, anybody) for the resource fork.  This combination works well
on the Macintosh, using SunTar and MacGZip.  My problem with using pkzip is
that pkware has a vested interest in the format.  In otherwords, they may
change the format at any time and for any reason.  Aladdin systems did this
on the macintosh with stuffit archives, and it makes it next to impossible
to share files with older systems (since the latest version is required, and
the latest version requires specific versions of the operating system).
tar/gzip would also be easier to manage for Unix users, including those
who can afford MacOS X.

In all likelyhood, this scheme would work well for emulator users as well.
Since the resource forks are encoded as the first step, and since most
versions of tar and gzip would not decode that final stage, the files would
could be uploaded to the emulator and decoded without fear of the extra
information being stripped.

Just some thoughts,
Byron.

Greg Buchner (nobody@wavetech.net) wrote:
: In article <3b0401f3@news.svn.net>, "Paul Grammens" <grammens@svn.net> 
: wrote:

: > ralmin <xbiber@bigpond.net.au> wrote
: > >
: > > There are some problems with ZIP because it doesn't support all the ProDOS
: > > file information like file types or forks. These things would need to be
: > > added in some way.
: > >
: > 
: > There are several Mac versions of ZIP, so I don't think that can be true.
: > Mac files have forks and file types as well.

: They're pretty much only out there for dealing with ZIP files from
: other sources, or the rare occasion of actually having to ZIP some
: files for people running windows, at which point, you usually don't
: care if the file/fork information gets stripped (when it's data files,
: if there's a fork, it usually doesn't matter too much and often only
: contains something like a preview).

: But, ZIP would be acceptable for most MacOS X things I think...some
: of the MacOS X programs come GZipped...

: Greg B.
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